39: Christian Criticism

I spend a lot of my spare time thinking about the intersection between film criticism and theology. Most of the time, this manifests itself in the conversations I have about individual films on Seeing & Believing. Our reviews on the podcast are informed by our theology, but most of the time I don't actively try to draw parallels between the movies we review and explicitly Christian beliefs. I happen to co-host a podcast about the movies with a fellow Christian, and our theology informs our approach to the art we talk about, but we're not trying to force those movies into a specific box. Sometimes I write about theological concepts that resonate with the movies I'm considering, but my goal is to never impose a lesson or idea into a story that doesn't actually have it; to do so would be a disservice to the art and the theology alike. It would be both critically and theologically dishonest.

This isn't to say that I'm perfect at this; the critical stance I'm working toward is a discipline, not a starting point. I grew up going to youth group. The Twitter memes about youth pastors Jesus-jukeing their way from current events to Bible verses are the highest form of cringe comedy in my mind, because I was steeped in that approach to art in high school. My teenage gateway into film criticism was reading Christian movie reviews of the consumer-report variety–the kind of reviews that spend more time counting swear words and sex scenes than they do on considering the actual craft of the film. I don't care for this kind of criticism now, but it's also a second language, the mindset I cultivated when I first learned that you could talk about art. It's easy, because it's a question-and-answer approach akin to catechism: what do I believe? And how does this art prop up those beliefs?

This attitude harmonizes with the shallowest non-faith-based pop criticism today. Bad-faith discourse about the movies tends to be about one of two things. One, how does this movie represent something in the real world? Two, how does it all fit into preexisting canon and IP, and is that satisfying to the most obsessive fans? The first approach treats the movie as an allegory, a puzzle to be solved, a mystery that rewards the viewers with magnifying glasses who can figure out a secret, additional layer of meaning. The worst artistic responses to this first approach are the movies that are built around a central metaphor, in which the metaphor is both the movie's reason for existence and also the only thing of substance within the final product. (Last year's Don't Worry Darling feels borne of this impulse to explore a metaphor, without much thought about how the world in which the metaphor is made real actually works.) The second approach is how we get movies like The Rise of Skywalker and YouTube criticism like CinemaSins countdowns: attempts from the studio to appease the loudest, angriest consumers of a piece of content^[1] on the one side, and consumers tallying up the insignificant details that reveal a movie to have been made by flesh-and-blood humans on the other.

These approaches treat movies as a thing to be owned and conquered, trophies in an unending quest to assert the owner's identity in a consumerist culture. If you are what you buy, and if time is money, then the movies you spend your time watching are an expresssion of who you are and what you value. Reviews become consumer reports: watch this movie because it represents queer people; don't watch this movie because it has an outdated view on women. Never mind that representation is merely another way of saying symbolizing. Simply acknowledging the presence of a concept in the world isn't doing anything to render that concept justice; like "raising awareness," representation is an early step and not a final goal. The artistic work to get past that point–of representation, of symbolizing something–involves more effort and time than we're comfortable to admit. Nor does it lend itself to easy answers on the critical end.

I'm still working through my own critical approach. I don't have all the answers, but I'm trying to work toward an ethic of curiosity and openness, especially toward the movies I find difficult. I'm drawn to criticism in part because, when done well, it's an artform that illuminates the critic's response to another form of art, tugging on the threads that resonate and pushing up against the pieces that are challenging. I do believe it's the critic's job to think critically about art, which is to say that if the art is bad, then we must say so. The best criticism helps me to understand why another critic loved something, or hated it, in concrete terms and in full engagement with every aspect of the art. It doesn't assume a shared worldview or ethic between critic and reader, but is instead a conversation, a way to reach mutual understanding, but not always agreement. It requires immense generosity and humility on the part of both critic and reader. I aspire to that level of criticism. Thankfully it's a journey, and not just a single step.

What I talked about:

On this week's episode of Seeing & Believing, Kevin and I reviewed M. Night Shyamalan's Knock at the Cabin and Jeff Nichols's 2011 film Take Shelter. The online discourse about Knock at the Cabin–which does have some truly wild views on how the world works–is partly what prompted this week's newsletter.

What I watched:

Last weekend I watched A Serious Man back-to-back with the aforementioned Take Shelter, a double feature that packs a wallop if you're interested in questions about belief and God and the end of the world. I also revisited Steven Soderbergh's Solaris for an upcoming podcast appearance; my rewatch firmly solidified it as one of my all-time favorite movies, and perhaps also my favorite George Clooney performance.